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Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

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Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#91

Post by XorNot »

joshstrange wrote: post #67
oeitho wrote: post #40

I'm starting to see more and more generated images of food at restaurants where I live, but I'm happy to say that its still somewhat rare. My partner and I usually just give a one star review each on Google when we pass by a place like this and then carry on.

Just so I have this clear, you rate a restaurant badly based on the pictures of the food and not the taste/flavor/etc? These places are doing their best to compete in a cutthroat environment with often razor-thin margins but you are willing to write them off and actively try to harm them for reaching for a tool to try and meet consumer's ever-increasing expectations? Just like in the native vs electron debate it's no…

They make and sell food in an age where literally everyone has a high quality camera in their pocket.

In their core business they're not going to show an actual picture of the actual product they intend to provide?

In an age where people routinely tweet/Instagram/message pictures of their served meals?

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#92

Post by fer »

jodacola wrote: post #60
simonw wrote: post #30

I'm fascinated by how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising in seemingly just the last six months - presumably because ChatGPT Images and Gemini Nano Banana finally got good enough at outputting text without obvious defects in the typography. The posters all look good - much better than their desktop publishing predecessors. And yet they also eat away at the credibility of the event or business for me.…

My perspective on this, as someone skeptical of (but also bullish on) AI, is complex and I haven't completely nailed it down. My knee-jerk reaction is instant credibility loss for the business/person/thing. Follow-on is sadness (what are we losing in society because of this?), and curiosity: if a polished appearance (even if it is mega plastic) is no longer a sign of quality, then what is? What signals do I need to l…

I have the opposite impression. For me the quality is the cake; polish is just the icing. Putting out a 5-min of effort output with an AI as your image, is all icing and no cake: it has all the right proportions, layout, etc, but something is very wrong with it.

Not sure how diffusion models work in detail so consider this wet neural slop, but I feel like the training data had a sizable portion of it of high quality art, photography, design, and the models captured mostly the polish: the crispiness, the geometry, the contrast: they're after all computable features. It's more difficult to capture the meaningful blurs, the deliberate deviations, and the organic rule breaking. They're properties much harder to "featurize" for, and rely on tags/labeling/descriptions, etc of variable quality.

By all means you can get that with AI anyway, but it also requires you to understand the art itself, and describe it in a way the model produces satisfactory results.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#94

Post by steveklabnik »

simonw wrote: post #90
joshstrange wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I said it elsewhere in this thread differently but people want to pretend the options are: 1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster OR 2. Use AI It's not, the money is often just not there to pay someone. So you get whatever the intern or the owner can slap together in whatever tool they know best (which is rarely the best tool for the job). It's completely understandable that they would re…

What's weird here is that I should be in total agreement with you. I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well. For the fliers I'm talking about here (think a hardware store promoting their summer sale) I don't think the impact on the local poster design community is meaningful. And yet... the resulting posters put me off. I'm trying to figur…

Okay I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and here's my "I'm currently drinking my coffee" take on this. I'm willing to be significantly wrong here, but for the sake of discussion, here's where I think I'm at.

I also agree with

> I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well.

But I also really hate these menus, I see them all the time as well. I think that my conclusion is slightly different than yours: in my opinion, just not a lot of people have taste. That's sort of like, true by the definition of taste, but what I mean is something more specific: it's not because of AI that I dislike these signs. It's because of what you said above:

> producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.

While it looks like a huge improvement to them, it does not to me. Our tastes differ.

Here's a version of this that doesn't involve AI at all: last night I ate sushi at a place I'd never been before. Their menu was a bit chaotic, and had a bunch of annotations, along with a guide to those annotations. One section had both "2" and "2 pieces" listed under the options, and so I was confused: what was the difference here? Turns out it's basically just a typo, both mean that. Combine that with some spelling mistakes, and yeah, I had a pretty bad impression of the menu. The sushi was fine though, I'd go back. But this wasn't a super low-end place, so the attention to detail being off made me a bit worried before I actually ate the food.

Same problem, same issue, AI is really the only variable here. And it is the natural downside of "democratization" or "helping more people do more things", naturally, there will be a lot more low-quality stuff out there than before. That's not actually inherently a bad thing. But it can feel weird.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#95

Post by cautiouscat »

diabllicseagull wrote: post #37

I get the consumers' ick when I see an AI-generated menu, logo, or sign as much as the next person. Beyond that, there is an argument to be made about the discrepancy between the pictorial depictions of a food item and what you are actually served in real life. I wish something akin to Japan's strict food packaging laws existed for restaurants.

I have a few friends I’d describe as high up in the restaurant industry. They’ll usually be skeptical of a menu with photos unless it’s a mom and pop place that’s been around for decades.

There’s a big reason more expensive restaurants don’t have pictures on their menus, even when they’re the best equipped to ensure your meal matches the picture.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#96

Post by cautiouscat »

simonw wrote: post #30

I'm fascinated by how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising in seemingly just the last six months - presumably because ChatGPT Images and Gemini Nano Banana finally got good enough at outputting text without obvious defects in the typography. The posters all look good - much better than their desktop publishing predecessors. And yet they also eat away at the credibility of the event or business for me.…

> The posters all look good

Maybe I’m misunderstanding but I haven’t seen many that I’d say look “good”. Especially food related ones.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#97

Post by cautiouscat »

gegtik wrote: post #3

I do think that AI signage/advertising is the new signifier of low-effort, low-skill output and that is how it will be perceived by clientele. Similar to someone just scrawling a sandwich board sign in chalk (which at this point I would prefer). Businesses will stand out from a taste perspective by continuing to hire human effort to make recognisable human output.

> Similar to someone just scrawling a sandwich board sign in chalk

As opposed to what? This is usually a sign of quality. If it’s in chalk it’s because it changes as the restaurant experiments and tries new things.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#98

Post by eloisius »

These are absolutely consuming Taipei over the last few months. This spring I saw an AI-generated menu for the first time, and then it was like overnight that now on basically every street there's at least one restaurant that has an AI menu, sign, or window dressing. It looks awful and I can't understand how anyone thinks it's a good idea. Noodles give me skin-crawling ants feeling. Chopsticks pick up tofu without pinching it, as if it's drawn magnetically. Spoons dip sauce from bowls that are smaller than the spoon.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#99

Post by joshstrange »

simonw wrote: post #90
joshstrange wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I said it elsewhere in this thread differently but people want to pretend the options are: 1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster OR 2. Use AI It's not, the money is often just not there to pay someone. So you get whatever the intern or the owner can slap together in whatever tool they know best (which is rarely the best tool for the job). It's completely understandable that they would re…

What's weird here is that I should be in total agreement with you. I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well. For the fliers I'm talking about here (think a hardware store promoting their summer sale) I don't think the impact on the local poster design community is meaningful. And yet... the resulting posters put me off. I'm trying to figur…

I guess I see very little "soul" in most marketing/advertising in the first place. It was slop well before LLMs entered the scene. If my local hardware store wants to put up a poster for their summer sale I don't care if it's black comic sans on white paper or if it's a AI-generated advertisement. Either way I'm not looking that closely at it and neither version were going to show up in an art museum or recieve design accolades.

There is so little intention in anything (again, even before LLMs) so I don't begrudge places for using LLMs to try and produce similar quality to what larger chains/corps are able to commision.

I see this as similar to things like people wanting "clean ingredients" or "sustainable packaging" or "healthy food" in restaurants/bakeries/etc. They _say_ they want that but they are not at all willing to _pay_ for it. To be clear, I do wish those things were the baseline, but they are not and unfortunately it is near-impossible to compete with other businesses that don't care about those things. At the end of the day consumers see "$15 hamburger" vs "$10 hamburger", the better/fewer ingredients, the better-paid labor, the recyclable packaging, etc simple don't matter. This is _not_ an argument to underpay workers, kill the environment, and fill your hamburgers with sawdust, it's simply a statement on how hard it is to compete when consumers very rarely reward companies for doing things "right" no matter how much lip-service they pay to it.

I've watched a close relative have people say "you should do X thing!" where X is something like "fewer ingredients" or "low calorie" or "healthy"-type things, only to see sales crater after an initial boost. People try it, they feel good about themselves, then they go right back to buying the thing packed with sugar.

There is a wide gulf between "what people say that want" and "how they actually behave". LLMs are currently in a category where people can have visceral reaction and claim "I'd never buy something from a company that does that" but I can tell you right now that won't last. Be anti-bad-design, be anti-bad-code but don't be anti-LLM because that opinion isn't going to age well (and yes, I know _you_ simonw, aren't anti-LLM, I'm speaking generally).

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